Thinking about artificial intelligence can help clarify what makes us human—for better and for worse.
We are all in the same boat these days, no matter what profession or occupation or field we may be in. Including the field of “teenager” and “toddler”. We are all learning about living in, with, through, a AI active environment, much as Marshal McLuhan tried to help us understand what living in a “media rich” environment might entail.
And just as it was so hard for McLuhan to explain what in the end is how our consciousness works in mediated environments… we are facing the same challenge today trying to understand our experiences in a useful way, and to obtain guidance into the future. Or to cope with the present.
Here are three resources to help a bit with that understanding. The first is a sort of encyclopedia of AI memes from various films/ TV and books. Each has a “take” on what AI mixed with humanity results in.
The second is a catalog of quirky things AI experiments have come up with which reveal some window into how AI thinking can differ from human thinking.
The third is a current story about what’s up with hardware that supports AI so-called “machine learning”, and reveals just how rapid the advancement in that side of AI tech presently is. This has huge implications for education, as machine learning can “learn how to teach” and “learn how to learn” among other things.
Just to be clear, we aren’t talking about something that won’t arrive for years and years, but something we live with right now. We can all provide anecdotes from our daily lives of how we are interacting with AI all day long.
Just for “fun”, here’s one: what happens when a toddler starts learning how to talk partly by “talking with” a AI persona like say Siri, or Alexa? Language and tone of voice are rich with emotional content. How is growing up talking to a computer different from growing up not talking to a computer? We probably want to know! We already have at least a couple of generations that grew up talking along with Sesame Street.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/How-Frightened-Should-We-Be-of-A.I.-The-New-Yorker.pdf”] [gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/AI-quirky-thinking.pdf”] [gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Google-announces-a-new-generation-for-its-TPU-machine-learning-hardware-TechCrunch-1.pdf”]